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before NetApp
On Computers, Colleges, Castration, and Risk
My good fortune to be involved in technology came from not
listening to my mother. When I was young, a family friend taught me
the rudiments of programming, and I loved it. I read early computer
hobby magazines like BYTE and Dr. Dobb’s Journal. At fourteen, I
bought a build-it-yourself mail-order computer called an IMSAI
8080. It had binary toggle switches on the front and little
flashing lights. I programmed the lights to go back and forth. A
television set was the display, and an audiocassette tape recorder
was my first storage system ever. This was in 1977, right at the
dawn of the personal comput-ing era.
My mother seemed to feel that working with computers was not a
serious profession. Perhaps she saw a matchbook cover that read,
“You, too, can learn computer repair!” with a picture of some guy
fussing with vacuum tubes and his butt crack hang-ing out. She made
her opinion clear: computers were fine as a
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8 | Beginnings
hobby, like ham radio, but you would never make that your
career.
Computers challenged me, but high school did not. Some might
feel that high school boredom is normal. My mother disagreed, and
she worked to make education rewarding for her children. My younger
sister had learning disabilities, but somehow, whenever we moved to
a new location, or my sister graduated from one school to another,
a perfect program for her needs was always just starting. Years
later, I commented on this lucky streak to my father, who said,
“Dave, you do know
Sordid Details Explained
The 42nd Street Fleabag
I was, in fact, conceived in a dodgy hotel outside Times Square.
My
parents had arrived in New York on their way to Europe. Bad
planning
and bad luck conspired to put them up in a low-cost hotel in
Midtown.
My father told me, “The place wasn’t so bad,” but my mother
insisted,
“Oh, yes it was,” in that tone of voice that ends discussions.
They
went out for dinner, and by the time they got back, the drug
store had
closed.
That night in Times Square had to be my beginning. My father
had
been away on a business trip for a couple of weeks before, and
their
trip to Europe was romantically challenged due to a rough ocean
cross-
ing that left them both hopelessly seasick.
That was my first trip to Europe, and I don’t remember a
thing.
Opium
My mother was on a trip to India, and her tour group came to a
little
hut in the desert. Mom approached some wizened old men who
were
stirring a pot of liquid, and one of them cupped some of the
fluid in his
hand and offered it to her. She asked the guide if she should
partake.
He told her that it would be the polite thing to do, so she
slurped the
liquid from his hand. Only then did the guide tell her it was
opium.
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Before NetApp | 9
the reason for that coincidence is because that’s what your mom
did with her life?” Many school systems were not aware of the laws
about what schools must do for students with learn-ing
disabilities. My mother made them aware.
My problem required a different approach: the law protects
students with disabilities, but not students with boredom. My mom
came across an article in Smithsonian magazine about young teens
taking college courses at George Washington Uni-versity (GW) in
Washington, D.C., not far from our home in Virginia. We followed
up, and at age fourteen, halfway through
Much later, at a family gathering, Mom was sitting with a
particularly
staid relative, and I took it upon myself to suggest that she
tell us all
about the time she did heroin. “It wasn’t heroin. It was opium,”
she
blurted out. She then reconsidered and said, “I mean, I don’t
know
what you’re talking about.”
The Cathouse College Fund
While living in Virginia, my parents owned some investment
property in
Northern California. One day, the local sheriff called my father
and asked
if a man named Kentucky Wooten was his property manager. Dad
had
never heard of the man. It turned out that this con artist
searched prop-
erty records for out-of-state owners, rented out their property
illegally,
and pocketed the cash. He rented the ramshackle house on my
parent’s
property to an enterprising woman and her two grown daughters,
who
established the property as the local whorehouse. Evicting
anyone in
California is tough, but tossing out pregnant women is
especially hard.
So, for the next couple years, at any one time, at least one of
the women
was pregnant, staving off any attempt to clear them out. My
grandfather,
who lived nearby, collected the rent for my parents until my
grandmother
found out and put a stop to it. Eventually, my parents did
extricate them-
selves from being brothel owners, and later the property paid
their kids’
college tuition.
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10 | Beginnings
my sophomore year of high school, I started college: high school
classes in the morning and college classes in the afternoon. I had
always planned to be an engineer, like my father, but my adviser at
GW felt that a narrow focus was bad for kids so young. For every
course in calculus or physics, he made me take one in literature,
philosophy, or creative writing. Even for an engineer, writing is a
powerful tool; being forced to take classes with term papers was
lucky for my later career. Never underestimate the power of a
clearly written proposal.
This mix of college and high school worked well, but after a
year and a half, my high school principal told me that I need-ed
another year of high school math to graduate. Despite my three
semesters of college calculus, he suggested pre-calculus, since
that was the most advanced math class available. He also said that
I’d never be successful without a high school diploma. That was an
early lesson in idiot bureaucrats. I dropped out of high school to
go to college full time.
GW taught me to love liberal arts, so even though I planned to
be an electrical engineer, I didn’t want to attend an engineering
school like MIT or Caltech. I chose Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania because it is a liberal arts school with a solid
engineering program. That didn’t work out so well, because
engineering prerequisites dominated my coursework. I could share a
dorm with nonengineers, but I couldn’t take many classes with them.
Always read the fine print.
••
Even though I was at Swarthmore, I was still supposed to be a
senior in high school, so colleges continued to send me
applica-
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Before NetApp | 11
tions. One was from Deep Springs College, a two-year liberal
arts school located on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in
California’s high desert. The school had three hundred head of
cattle and twenty-six students who worked the ranch when not
studying. It looked crazy, but I mentioned it to my uncle, a
Russian his-tory professor at Cornell, and he said, “Deep Springs
is a great school. If they invited you to apply, you must.” Instead
of try-ing to take liberal arts courses at the same time as
engineering, I decided to go to Deep Springs for a concentrated
dose. If you keep your eyes open, solutions often present
themselves.
Deep Springs College was founded in 1917 by L.L. Nunn, a
high-tech entrepreneur of his time. His story is a lesson in
business. He was a pioneer in alternating current (AC)
elec-tricity, which powered his mine in Telluride, Colorado. In the
late 1800s, there was a battle between George Westinghouse, who
thought AC was best, and Thomas Edison, who preferred direct
current (DC). Westinghouse was right—AC is what we use today—but
Edison was a brilliant if unorthodox marke-teer. AC was too
dangerous, Edison argued, and to prove his point, he traveled from
town to town, publicly electrocuting dogs and cats. Search the Web
for “edison electrocute ele-phant” for an unsettling video. Edison
even funded an electric chair company—AC powered of course—to
promote the link between AC and death. L.L. Nunn convinced
Westinghouse that a remote mountain mine was the perfect proving
ground for this dangerous technology. It worked, and Nunn converted
his mining company into a power company, electrifying mines across
the rugged West.
Finding skilled workers so far from civilization was a
chal-lenge, so Nunn started a school to train electrical
engineers.
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12 | Beginnings
That sparked a lifelong interest in education, and Nunn later
bought a ranch in eastern California, two valleys over from Death
Valley, and started Deep Springs College there. Deep Springs
combines a liberal arts education with hard physical labor, desert
isolation, and student self-governance. Students select the faculty
as well as the next year’s incoming class. The isolation and small
size—just twenty-six students—create an intense community life.
Nunn believed that ranch work helped balance intellectual pursuits.
Adolescents reading Aristotle and Nietzsche can get a little full
of themselves, but it is hard to take yourself too seriously when
shoveling cow manure.
Ranch work can be risky. If someone gave you a dull pock-et
knife, pointed out a five hundred pound bull calf, and said, “Jump
that fence and cut off his balls,” would you do it? If you were
fool enough to try, you’d probably end up with a broken arm (best
case). Most people intuitively avoid foolish risk. But what if the
ranch manager demonstrated the procedure and explained its
importance? Castrated bull calves are easier to manage and fetch a
higher price at market. Before Deep Springs, I could never have
imagined performing rudimentary surgery on a touchy region of an
enormous, angry beast; now I’ve done hundreds. Risk can be
managed.
People are sometimes shocked that I’ve slaughtered cows and pigs
for food. They say, “That’s awful—I couldn’t do it.” But how is
paying someone else to kill your food for you more moral than doing
it yourself? The reality is, they could do it if they needed to.
Ranch life demands self-sufficiency: it includes many jobs that you
may not want to do, that you may not even be qualified to do, but
when no one else is available, you do them anyway.
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Before NetApp | 13
Years later, these lessons were surprisingly relevant in Silicon
Valley start-up companies. Not the details, but the attitudes and
styles of thinking.
••
After George Washington, Swarthmore, and Deep Springs, I was
ready for a break from college. I spent the next two sum-mers as a
paid cowboy for Deep Springs. Between the two summers, I rented a
room by the week in a seedy part of San Francisco and looked for
work.
Short on cash, I spotted a place where you could sell your
blood. What the hell, I thought, and got eight bucks twice a week
for my plasma. Mom was appalled. My parents were not rich, but they
were comfortable. Both came from families that had little money
during the Depression, and like many from that era, they were
savers. They would have taken care of me, but I wanted to make it
on my own.
The state employment agency wasn’t much help for land-ing a
computer job. San Francisco wasn’t as close to Silicon Valley as it
appeared on the map, and the job agent knew nothing about computers
except that they involved typing. She gave me a test, and I could
bang out seventy words a min-ute, so she sent me to an insurance
company where I spent the winter typing people’s names and diseases
on index cards. I’d rather have been shoveling shit. A winter of
typing at Blue Shield gave me a very clear vision—better than most
students have—of why I should return to college.
I applied to Princeton and was accepted as a physics major. Even
though physics had been my favorite part of electrical
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14 | Beginnings
engineering at Swarthmore, I struggled immediately. Princeton
had multiple class tracks: physics for nonmajors, for majors, and
for honors. I was in the middle track and getting middling grades.
Meanwhile, I was taking computer classes just for fun. I talked my
way into the “cutter course,” designed to weed out students who
didn’t belong in computer science. The professor told me that I
didn’t have the right background and would not do well. Eventually
he relented, and he later gave me one of only three A+ grades that
he had ever handed out. When I got a programming assignment, I
would rush home to start work. The problems were like fun puzzles.
Physics homework was a painful grind.
Aristotle said that the secret to happiness is to find what you
do well and do it. Getting a C– on a required physics course
finally convinced me I was in the wrong place. I changed my major
to computer science. Thank goodness for that bad
grade. Had I been a tiny bit better at physics, I might be a
second-rate physics teacher at a second-rate school today. My brain
was not wired well for phys-ics, but it worked great for computer
science. This was before people saw comput-ers as the path to
riches. I didn’t switch to computer science for the money; I
switched because I loved the work.
••
The Secret to Success
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
.com, was my roommate for a year
at Princeton. He also started as
a physics major and switched to
computer science. The president
of Princeton told me that they
were examining the room we
shared for the secret to entre-
preneurial success. In our senior
year, we discovered a mummi-
fied mouse in an old couch that
we scavenged off the street, and
we hung it by a string over the
entrance to the room. Perhaps
that was it.
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Before NetApp | 15
After Princeton, in 1986, I moved to Silicon Valley. Résumés are
generally boring, so I decided to include “herded, branded, and
castrated cattle” on mine, if only to see whether anyone actually
read the whole thing. During one interview, I watched the hiring
manager read my résumé. She scanned down the page and her eyes went
wide. She cracked a little smile and said, “Management experience,
I see.”
My first real job was computer programming at a two-year-old
start-up called MIPS Computer Systems, which designed computer
processor chips. It had about a hundred employees and was growing
fast. Too fast. This was my first experience with rapid growth, and
it taught me how growth can cause pain and confusion. There were
always new bosses, and communication was spotty and vague. Being a
program-mer at a chip company put me outside the company’s core
mission. I wanted to be part of a company where my work was the
focus; I wanted to be on the cutting edge. After two years, I
decided to leave.
In 1988, I joined Auspex Systems as employee number seven teen.
It was my first small start-up, and product devel-opment had barely
begun. Our goal was to build a network storage system that was
bigger, faster, and more reliable than anything on the
market—better, in particular, than anything from Sun Microsystems,
which was the market leader.
Start-ups have a sort of pulse. You work work work: no customers
and a limited supply of money. It’s very creative and exciting
because you are inventing from scratch. Eventually, hopefully, it
all comes to a crescendo where you ship version 1.0. Then the
creative work goes into a lull. You want to ship the exciting new
features of 2.0, but first you have to do the bug fixes of 1.0.1
and the minor features of 1.1 and 1.2. But the
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16 | Beginnings
features that matter most to customers often aren’t the most
exciting to design and develop. I had a knack for finding small
projects that made the customer’s life better. At a trade show
after the 1.3 release, we had a poster listing four new features,
and three of them were things that I had thought up and developed.
If you focus on customers instead of technology, that lull becomes
more interesting.
I went through several bosses at Auspex—I might have been a
problem employee—but James Lau was the boss that stuck. Our skills
and styles were a perfect match, his strengths aligning with my
weaknesses and vice versa. For the past twenty years, James has
always been my boss or my partner. I also met Mike Malcolm, who was
brought in by Auspex’s venture capi-talists (VCs) to help resolve
some technical disputes among the engineers. He was like a
professor overseeing unruly graduate students, which wasn’t a
surprise since he actually had been a professor of computer science
at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He had also started and
been the CEO of Waterloo Microsystems, an operating system company
that competed with and lost to Novell and Microsoft. Together Mike,
James, and I started NetApp, but that came later.
In the early 1990s, Silicon Valley was an entrepreneur-ial
wonderland, and for anyone involved in start-ups, it was tempting
to start your own. Pen-based computers looked like a great
opportunity. They were small, portable computers that you could
carry with you all day and operate with a pen. Apple had the
Newton, Microsoft had Pen Windows, and there were also start-ups
like Go, EO, and Momenta. James and I observed that each new
generation of computers created the opportunity for new start-ups.
The people who quit their jobs
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Before NetApp | 17
and developed the first programs for PCs or for Apples hit it
big. Our idea was to leave Auspex and develop applications for
these emerging pen-based computers.
••
The decision to quit Auspex was hard. We were in on the ground
floor, working with people that we liked and respected. Only a
small fraction of start-ups even get funding, and of those, only a
fraction survive to ship product, never mind get-ting profitable or
going public. So it seemed like a big risk. Then I examined the
situation from a different perspective. Several of my friends had
left jobs to earn law degrees or MBAs, and nobody viewed that as
risky. I figured that starting a company had to be at least as
educational as an MBA. So my downside was the same as theirs—a year
or two without pay—and my upside was much better, because we had
some probability, no matter how small, of creating a successful
company.
Castrating a bull is a metaphor for learning to take risk.
Dropping out of high school, moving to San Francisco, switch-ing
majors, leaving MIPS—all were early experiments in risk taking.
Each taught something valuable about what I wanted (for example, a
career in computer science), or what I didn’t (a career typing
“osteoporosis” and “chlamydia” on index cards). You shouldn’t take
risks so dangerous that they might kill you. Or if you must, get
lessons first. But even when not deadly, risk should feel
uncomfortable, should push you beyond the famil-iar and safe. An
ex-girlfriend arranged a special Vietnamese meal for me: snake
prepared seven ways. As the guest of honor,
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18 | Beginnings
I knew I’d be the one to eat the raw heart. What I hadn’t
real-ized was that it would still be beating when I swallowed
it.
The trick is figuring out which risks are worthwhile. Some-times
opportunities arise—but should you grab them? Was it really
sensible to leave high school, quit a great job, or jump that fence
into the bull’s pen with a dull pocket knife? Those choices all
worked out pretty well for me. You obviously can’t accept every
risk that comes your way—you shouldn’t—but when I look back at the
really significant turning points in my life, they all involved
risk. That ex-girlfriend? She’s my wife now. Perhaps How to Choke
Down a Live, Beating Snake Heart should have been this book's
title, but that seemed like too much. All in all, the snake was
better than the dog meat.
James agreed with me that starting a software company to develop
applications for pen-based computers was a worth-while risk, and
the two of us left Auspex in January 1991. One risk that never
occurred to us was that Auspex might sue us. Nevertheless, our
former boss threatened exactly that. He was upset with us for
leaving and said that the other engineers had to understand that
leaving was not okay. James objected that our new venture was not
even remotely competitive, so Auspex had no grounds for a suit.
Our former boss explained, “You don’t understand the legal
system. Maybe I can’t win, but I have more money, so I’ll have
better lawyers. If anybody else leaves, I’ll sue you, even if they
don’t join your company. I have to stop the bleeding.” That lawsuit
never materialized, but the threat left a sour taste in our
mouths.
In any case, we didn’t have much luck starting our com-pany.
Venture capitalists were very happy to talk with
start-up-experienced programmers like James and me; they were
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Before NetApp | 19
curious about what we thought and tried to hire us for their
other projects, but they were not happy to give money to two
technical guys without business experience or a CEO. Basically,
they bought us lunch. Eventually we teamed up with another
fledgling venture, but never got much traction. To make matters
worse, Pen Windows, Apple Newton, and the other devices were not
catching on. Today lots of people use smartphones and tablet PCs,
but the hardware back then was too heavy, too bulky, and the
handwriting recognition didn’t really work. It was an idea ahead of
its time.
It’s hard to be at the right place at the right time, so
per-haps the best alternative is to go to the right place and wait
there. VCs never gave us money, but we met quite a few of them,
which helped us understand how they think. I had saved some money
from MIPS’ going public, and we also took some consulting jobs to
make ends meet, but my bank account was running low. It was almost
a year since we’d left Auspex, and I was unsure what to do, when
James called one day and said, “I just heard from Mike Malcolm. He
wants to have lunch with us to talk about building toasters.”
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InterludeWhat NetApp Does
My mom periodically brings groups of her friends, mostly people
outside the tech industry, to NetApp headquarters for a tour.
Everything goes great until one of them asks, “What exactly does
your company do?” Explaining high-tech compa-nies is hard. I used
to struggle, but now I have an answer.
NetApp sells giant boxes of disk drives—hundreds or thousands of
disks—to big corporations with lots of data to store. Many movie
studios keep animation and special effects on our systems. Yahoo
stores e-mail for hundreds of millions of users. Others store less
interesting stuff like financial data, information about customers
and employees, or maybe engi-neering designs for cars and chips.
Most Americans have indi-rectly used a NetApp product without ever
knowing it.
We sell big boxes of disks, but the trick is, we don’t make the
disks or even the boxes they go in. We buy those from other
companies. Our most important product is software that helps
customers deal with the problems they have on account of all the
disks we sold them. We protect data in case disks fail. If a whole
data center burns down, we’ve got software that makes sure there’s
a second copy of the data someplace far away.
Recently we’ve been getting into more advanced forms of
protection. If the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
21
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22 | Beginnings
visits your company and wants to see e-mails that your CEO sent
five years ago, you had better be able to find them. We have
software that makes sure your data has been saved and proves that
it hasn’t been tampered with. Or if you have pri-vate information
that you don’t want anyone else to see, even if they steal it, we
have encryption to make it unreadable. Banks use our encryption to
protect their customers’ financial data, and the military uses it
in Humvees in Iraq to make sure that secrets stay secret.
In other words, even though we sell big systems full of disk
drives, mostly what customers like about us is that we help them
manage all that data more efficiently and easily than our
competitors. Customers can store lots of data in one place, be
confident that it’s safely protected, and manage the whole process
with as little hassle as possible.
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